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On Thursday, David Letterman stopped by Ellen to promote the second season of his Netflix talk show, My Next Guest Needs No Introduction, and the discussion quickly turned into a retrospective on Letterman’s decades-long career. While the longtime longtime host called his new role “great,” he believes he could have gotten here sooner if he not overstayed his welcome on The Late Show. According to Letterman, he “should have left like 10 years ago,” but “nobody had the guts to fire” him from the storied CBS talk show.
Letterman wasted no time before commending the folks at Netflix for enabling My Next Guest Needs No Introduction to happen. “It’s great,” he said. “The Netflix people have been very generous to let an old man anywhere near their building.” He added that Ellen DeGeneres will be a guest on the forthcoming second season, which does not yet have a premiere date. Once he got out his Netflix excitement, Letterman was ready to really jump into the conversation. “Here’s the mistake I made,” he began, totally unprompted. “I stayed on television way too long.” DeGeneres was quick to correct him, saying, “That’s not true,” but the legendary host stayed firm.
“Yes, it is true, and I’ll tell you what happened,” he replied. “It turns out nobody had the guts to fire me. And I should have left like 10 years ago.” Letterman went on to say that while working on The Late Show, which he hosted from 1993 to 2015, he forgot the golden rule: “You want to make sure you have some energy to direct towards other things,” he said. “I did not. All I cared about was myself.”
“And then the show was gone, and so I had to realize, ‘Oh, I’ve been looking through the wrong end of the telescope,'” he continued. “There is more to life than, ‘So, tell me about your pet beaver.'” Of course, as DeGeneres pointed out, My Next Guest Needs No Introduction — the first season included six episodes, with only one released per month — requires less of a time commitment than a nightly talk show. As such, Letterman has more time to devote to other passions, like Habitat for Humanity. “It’s great. You’re actually going out there after a disaster and doing really great work,” said DeGeneres. “It’s a lot of fun,” said Letterman.
Watch Letterman discuss his late night career in the clip above.
